Poetry is Hard

20Jan

So, I’ve been going through the stories in Dark Aeons some more, mostly the edits sent to me by Jacob G. Adams, and came to the conclusion that poetry is hard. This was a result of me going through my poem “What Walks Under Moonlight” from that collection, and having a lot of trouble with the meter and rhyme scheme. I probably should have started smaller. Too bad I’m awful at starting small. My other poems are fine, because they don’t pretend to have a rhyme scheme or meter, so I suppose it’s more fair to say that poetry with a rhyme scheme and meter are hard. I have much more respect for poets now than I used to; they are masters of the word.

I also discovered the downside to spending too long on a poem, especially when you start reading it out loud dramatically, is that you start to think in meter and rhyme. When you try to edit prose – say the short story “The Vessel,” and Mr. Adams’ edits of it – you end up being terribly bothered by the lack of parallel sentence structure, the varying lengths of sentences, and dammit, the lack of rhyming couplets! I was forced to put aside the short story after a few minutes of frustration, and to get the rhyme out of my head I worked on studying the Geomantic figures. When I returned to the story half an hour later, I found I had driven the poetry out of my head, and could edit prose again!